New SeaMicro servers with Intel’s Atom N570 dual-core processors

SeaMicro recently announced a new low-power server the SM10000-64, this server features 512 x Intel Atom N570 1.66GHz processors which combined equates to roughly 850GHz of processing power.

Let’s start with power consumption, according to PCWorld.com the 512 Atoms will provide better performance-per-watt than an Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron-based servers, apparently it is targeted towards data centers which deal with e-mail, social networking and search, the Atom chips allow for quick processing of small amounts of data, whereas Xeon and Opeteron CPUs are suited to more intensive tasks.

It is thought that this server consumers 15-17% less power than its predecessor (the SM10000 server), also the last server only supported 32-bit software and had a 2GB addressable memory ceiling, whereas the SM10000-64 supports 64-bit software and has a 4GB ceiling.

The server supports up to 1TB of DDR3 RAM and allows for up to 64 hard drives / solid-state drives, it is 17.5 inch tall, which equates to 10 server racks. If you are really interested in SeaMicro’s new server check out the official website for detailed specifications and an overview.

As you would probably expect this server is not cheap, prices start at $148,000, but just remember you are saving roughly 17% on power consumption costs, I wonder if other server manufacturers will begin to utilize high-numbers of Atom CPUs.